CTA expanding ex-offender program

March 07, 2013|By Hal Dardick, Chicago Tribune reporter

Michael Russell is training to become a bus driver, just a few years after doing hard time for selling crack cocaine, thanks to a CTA program that's being quadrupled in size, the transit agency announced Wednesday.

Michael Russell is training to become a bus driver just a few years after doing hard time for selling crack cocaine, thanks to a CTA program that the transit agency plans to quadruple in size.

On Wednesday, a teary-eyed Russell told reporters about his raised stature in the eyes of his three children. The change, he said, is a direct result of the CTA Apprenticeship Program for nonviolent offenders.

"This was the best thing that ever happened to me," said Russell, a 38-year-old Auburn Gresham resident. "If it wasn't for this program, I don't know where I'd be."

In 2009, Russell joined the CTA program while on work release after doing three years in prison for selling crack. He cleaned train cars at O'Hare International Airport. One day he was sent to a CTA facility in Rosemont, where a manager noticed his hard work, CTA President Forrest Claypool said.

That recognition led to a full-time position, and now, after getting a commercial driver's license, he's training to become a part-time bus driver. Of 322 people in the program since August 2008, 15 have landed full-time CTA jobs and 114 have gotten jobs elsewhere as a result of the job training and social services offered by the CTA and nonprofit agencies, officials said.

The CTA has 65 slots for ex-offenders to clean trains. An additional 200 will be hired to clean buses, Claypool said. The CTA chief announced the program expansion at a news conference called by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to trumpet the development. They were surrounded by West Side pastors who minister to thousands of ex-offenders.

"If you want to make sure that an ex-offender does not become a repeat offender, you have to have job opportunities for them to prove themselves," Emanuel said. "And that's what this program does."